During surgery or in the emergency room, it is frequently necessary to infuse blood rapidly into a patient, particularly when massive blood losses have occurred. Patients having inadequate blood volume can suffer serious consequences.
There are many situations where large amounts of blood can be lost in a very short period of time, for example, in cases of serious automobile accidents, gun shot wounds in critical areas of the body, and a variety of major surgery including cancer surgery and heart and liver transplants.
In the past, the replacement of large amounts of blood loss has been a major problem to the surgical teams attending a suffering patient. A common method of rapid infusion includes the use of a plurality of infusion sites simultaneously. Infusion bags or bags of stored banked blood are interconnected by intravenous tubing. Frequently, a plurality of medical personnel are required to oversee the various infusion sites and to personally ensure the flow of blood from the blood bags or monitor the pumps which infuse the blood to the patient.
It is also well known that the temperature of the blood to be infused into a patient is a critical item which must be monitored closely. In this regard, to maintain the infused blood at the desired temperature, various arrangements of heating coils have been strategically placed around the infusion, thus increasing the complexity of arrangement and requiring additional personnel to ensure successful operation.
It can readily be seen that from the foregoing, that any apparatus which would satisfy the various requirements of rapid infusion while at the same time reducing the number of medical and/or technical personnel required to monitor the equipment would be a much desired improvement over presently known systems and practices used in such critical life threatening situations.